Tommy Swerdlow

Tommy Swerdlow is a self-expresser from the old school. He’s a poet-screenwriter-actor-director-teacher, whatever he can get his hands on. He wrote a movie called Cool Runnings that people seemed to like, and a few others as well, including Little Giants and Snow Dogs. Swerdlow was the uncredited first writer on the movie Shrek and came up with Donkey. He does not receive residuals; it is a source of great pain and trauma. Swerdlow also created the television series Brutally Normal with his old partner Michael Goldberg, which aired on the WB in 2000. You never saw it, but it was good. Swerdlow was a stalwart on the briefly thriving L.A. poetry scene of the early ‘90s. His poetry CD Prisoner of the Gifted Sleep was released on New Alliance records, and poems are featured on various compilation CDs and in a lot of magazines. He considers himself a poet first and foremost, which is pretty obnoxious but has some truth to it. His movie A Thousand Junkies, which co-wrote, directed and co-stars in will be released in January 2018.